German general elections are a combination of Westminster-style constituencies (where an MP is elected first-past-the-post) and a proportional list-based system. Voters choose both an MP for their locality, and express a preference for a party. After each directly elected MP has been chosen, the rest of the Bundestag is drawn from various party lists so that its final composition matches the proportion of votes for each party (with a threshold of 5% of the national vote, below which a party gets no MPs at all).

Frauke Petry, co-leader of Alternative for Germany, has won her constituency in Saxony and will be one of a projected 88 AfD MPs.

AfD’s co-leader Frauke Petry has won her constituency in Saxony, top of the poll with 37.4% and gaining the district from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s ruling CDU. Two of Mrs Petry’s AfD colleagues in neighbouring Saxony districts were also directly elected – and at 2 a.m. German time came the sensational news that AfD is now the largest party in Saxony as a whole with almost 670,000 votes (27.0%) in this region of former East Germany! At a press conference the morning after this stunning result, Frauke Petry unfortunately distracted from the party’s success by announcing that she would not sit with AfD in the Bundestag. She then walked out of the press conference leaving party colleagues surprised and embarrassed. The party will hope not to be blighted by further displays of political immaturity.

AfD’s 12.6% vote was a significant improvement on polls at the start of the campaign that had put the party below 10%. This will make AfD the third largest party in the Bundestag: they are now projected to have 88 MPs but the precise total will depend detailed calculations not yet complete, due to the electoral system. Conservative Chancellor Merkel and her ex-coalition partners, the social-democratic SPD, have each polled lower than expected. Merkel will now struggle to form a viable coalition government, and will have to enter talks with both the liberal FDP and the Greens.

Exit poll shows that AfD is now the most popular party among male voters in the former East Germany

Merkel’s CDU/CSU polled 33.0%, down 9% from the previous election in 2013. The SPD was second on 20.5%, down 5.2% and a record postwar low, despite having enjoyed a brief boost in the polls earlier this year. AfD were third with 12.6%, up 7.9%. The liberal FDP (on various occasions postwar coalition partners with either CDU/CSU or SPD) will be back in the Bundestag with 10.7% (up 5.9%) after losing all their MPs in 2013. The Left Party (ex-communists and left-wing former SPD members) managed 9.2% (up 0.6%) and the Greens are similarly almost unchanged from last time with 8.9% (up 0.5%).

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s pro-immigration policies have cost her party millions of votes

A few days ago in one of his final campaign speeches, AfD’s lead candidate Alexander Gauland said that Germans had the right to be proud of their soldiers’ record in the two 20th century world wars:

“If the French are rightly proud of their emperor and the Britons of Nelson and Churchill, we have the right to be proud of the achievements of the German soldiers in two world wars.”

Many journalists worldwide have been writing that AfD will be the first “far right” party to gain seats in the postwar German Bundestag. However the Guardian’s Berlin correspondent Philip Oltermann points out that at the very first Bundestag election in 1949 the Deutsche Rechtspartei (DRP – German Right Party), sometimes known as the German Conservative Party (DKP), won five seats.

This party suffered various splits, with some of its MPs joining the Socialist Reich Party (SRP) which was banned in 1952.

Some others then joined the Deutsche Reichspartei (German Reich Party, or German Empire Party, confusingly also abbreviated as DRP) which developed links with Sir Oswald Mosley and included Luftwaffe ace Hans-Ulrich Rudel among its members. This DRP never won Bundestag seats, though did win representation in the Rhineland-Palatinate Landtag.

The NPD of course never won a Bundestag seat, though again winning various Landtag seats, and polling a peak of 3.6% at the 1969 Bundestag election.

The Deutsche Partei (German Party, DP) was a more respectable version of nationalism and had Bundestag seats from 1949 to 1961: indeed the DP was a coalition partner with the conservative CDU and CSU until 1960.

In 1960 the DP merged with the GB/BHE (a party representing Germans expelled from the eastern territories) to form the All-German Party (GDP), but this new merged party failed to win Bundestag seats at the 1961 election, and quickly faded, with several of its leading activists co-founding the new NPD in 1964.

Schönhuber’s Republikaner (Republican) party, which had its big success at the 1989 European election with 6 MEPs, never entered the Bundestag: its best result was 2.1% in 1990. At the founding of the Republikaner in 1983 as a split from the Bavarian conservative CSU, they had two Bundestag MPs (who had been elected as CSU) but by the time of the next Bundestag election in 1987 these two had quit the party and Schönhuber decided the party was too weak to contest those elections.

Thirty years on, German politics has been transformed. Today’s front pages convey the liberal establishment’s horror.

The United Kingdon Independence Party continues its recent record of embarrassment, stumbling around in search of credible leadership, following last week’s disastrous General Election results.

Today David Coburn, UKIP’s sole MEP in Scotland announced that he would contest the leadership vacated on Friday by Paul Nuttall, who had been in the top job for just over six months. Mr Coburn is an ally of former leader Nigel Farage, and has said that if Farage decides to return he will not stand against him.

On the same day that he expressed his interest in the party leadership, Mr Coburn (who is openly homosexual) received unwelcome publicity in the Daily Record, Scotland’s best-selling newspaper.

Ruaidhri McKim (a Scottish Dawn activist) was secretly filmed discussing his links to National Action and the Polish nationalist organisation NOP, as well as his membership of UKIP. Mr McKim said:I was in UKIP for a while. Then after Brexit I just left because I didn’t see a point in it anymore. There’s lots of radical people within it, but no one with any position is a radical. UKIP Scotland was fucked man. I’ve been drunk with David Coburn – he’s really good fun. He’s a fun guy.

Mr Coburn commented:I think this chap is grandstanding and blethering and I am surprised you are taking him remotely seriously. I am homosexual, speak Arabic and various other languages and I have spent my entire life fighting ignorance, racial and sexual intolerance. Print this crap and I will sue this individual, you and your organ.

Jenningsbet has 400 terminals spread across 100 high street shops. Each machine brings in an average of £53,000 per year, with Britain’s gambling addicts losing a record £1.8bn on FOBTs in the year to last September. Jenningsbet is co-owned by three Jewish brothers, the Pears family whose ancestor changed his name from Schleicher on arriving in Britain from Austria in the 19th century.

An extraordinary General Election that wiped out Theresa May’s Conservative majority also saw the electoral eclipse of the BNP and the English Democrats, none of whose candidates even came close to saving their deposits.

BNP chairman Adam Walker managed a slightly better result in Bishop Auckland, but was bottom of the poll with 991 votes (2.3%).

Meanwhile the English Democrats’ results were even worse, collapsing from an already low base. As the SNP lost support north of the border it appears that the Union is safe, and logically ‘English’ nationalism has lost relevance.

Paul Nuttall (left) succeeded Nigel Farage last year as UKIP leader following a period of internal turmoil. He resigned today after electoral humiliation,

Meanwhile those racial nationalists who believed that UKIP offered us some hope must think again after the party suffered a series of crushing defeats, ending with the resignation of humiliated leader Paul Nuttall.

Notable UKIP disasters included Clacton (formerly their sole parliamentary seat until Douglas Carswell’s resignation) where UKIP’s vote fell from 44.4% to 7.6%; Thanet South (where re-elected Conservative MP Craig Mackinlay still faces criminal charges for fraudulent overspending during his defeat of Nigel Farage in 2015) – UKIP vote down from 32.4% to 6.0%; and Boston & Skegness, a key target seat contested by Nuttall himself – UKIP vote down from 33.8% to 7.7%.

The only vaguely credible UKIP result came in Thurrock, where UKIP’s Tim Aker (an MEP from a part-Turkish background) fought a vigorous campaign against pro-Remain Tory MP Jackie Doyle-Price. However even here the UKIP vote fell from 31.7% to 20.1%. Ms Doyle-Price survived, and Labour pushed UKIP into third place.

Early results have confirmed the H&D team’s suspicions that this UK general election would prove a personal disaster for Prime Minister Theresa May.

We shall tomorrow be publishing our analysis of what this means for the racial nationalist movement. UKIP died today; the promise of “strong and stable” Tory rule has proved illusory. In fact Mrs May’s gamble has been arguably the most disastrous decision in the history of Western democracy. Only a handful of hardcore pro-Brexit constituencies in the Midlands shifted from Labour to Tory: Mansfield, NE Derbyshire, Walsall North and Stoke South (the latter a former BNP stronghold where UKIP boosted the Tories by standing aside).

This has proved a disastrous election for the multi-racial, politically correct Scottish National Party, whose former leader Alex Salmond was among several casualties: in fact the only silver lining for the Conservatives is that they will gain several seats from the SNP. Scottish independence is as dead as UKIP after tonight’s results. The Union is safe.

Though this might seem an excellent result for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour, racial nationalists should not despair.

Watch this space for developing news on an extraordinary election!

Meanwhile – sadly – this election confirmed the decline of our existing racial nationalist parties. Even in Pendle the BNP’s Brian Parker – his party’s last remaining borough councillor – managed only 1.6%, though he had no UKIP opponent.

2017 has definitively killed off Prime Minister May and two moribund parties: UKIP and the BNP.

Perhaps the best news of the election for H&D readers is that the Democratic Unionist Party emerges from this election greatly strengthened, with ten MPs in a (probably) hung parliament.

Amid predictable fake outrage from his Conservative opponents, Jeremy Corbyn – no friend of H&D! – has dared to tell the truth. As election campaigning resumed today (following several days hiatus due to the terrorist bombing of a Manchester concert hall) the Labour leader said: “We must be brave enough to admit the war on terror is simply not working. We need a smarter way to reduce the threat from countries that nurture terrorists and generate terrorism.”

In 2011 under David Cameron there was another policy lurch: Libya’s Islamists (or at least some of them) became our allies again in the campaign to oust Gaddafi. And now in the resultant post-Gaddafi chaos they are back to being the enemy.

All this would be mad enough: what makes it really crazy is that among the 57 varieties of alien immigrant thronging British cities are a large community of Libyans with personal and family ties to these very characters who were sometimes our allies, while at other times consigned to the torture chamber.

Foreign and defence policy has never had much space for morality. One response to the slaughter of British children in Manchester (the opposite of Corbyn’s policy) might be to carry out a reciprocal slaughter in Libya, targeting the extended families and support networks of IS.

But – setting moral questions entirely aside – H&D readers should recognise that such a policy (whether aiming at deterrence or merely revenge) requires precisely targeted and pitiless brutality. In their prime the likes of Gaddafi or Syria’s Hafez al-Assad were capable of that – hence their regimes survived. Does anyone really believe that Britain has the will (let alone the local knowledge) to follow such a policy to its logical conclusion, to take whatever the terrorists throw back at us and throw back more of the same, until eventually we supposedly crush them?

It’s not going to happen.

Aftermath of the IRA’s Manchester bomb in 1996. This bomb’s materials were supplied by Col. Gaddafi, sworn enemy of this week’s Manchester terrorists.

So we are left with the logic of Corbyn’s alternative. Some form of new deal with the Islamic world. We can only hope this would be less hypocritical then the deal with an earlier generation of bombers who targeted Manchester. Among this week’s many tragic ironies is that the bomb that devastated Manchester city centre in 1996, planted just a few yards away from the scene of this week’s carnage, was the work of IRA godfathers armed by Col. Gaddafi, the bitter enemy of this week’s suicide bomber and his family.

Corbyn of course has his own dishonourable record of IRA apologetics. And though his approach to today’s failed war on terror makes sense, there’s one aspect that Corbyn and his ilk will never admit. Alongside a reassessment of foreign policy must come a draining of the multi-ethnic swamp. We should return the teeming non-British masses of our towns and cities back to their countries of origin.

That option is not available for this year’s Millwall and Blackburn candidates, who will appear just as ‘Independent’ on the ballot paper and will have to rely on their campaign literature and publicity to make an impression on voters.

One group of fans did manage to register their own party just over a decade ago. The Seagulls Party was created by fans of Brighton & Hove Albion to campaign against their local council’s decision to refuse planning permission for a new stadium. Edward Bassford of the Seagulls Party polled 21.9% in a Lewes council by-election in August 2006. The following year the party effectively won its campaign, when central government overturned the local council’s decision and stadium development went ahead. Long since dissolved, the Seagulls Party saw its ultimate triumph with Brighton’s promotion to the Premier League this year.

Nominations closed at 4 pm on Thursday for next month’s General Election.

The National Front decided some time ago not to contest this election, so the main nationalist party in contention will be the BNP.

We believe that there will be nine BNP candidates plus another standing without using the party name, and seven English Democrats. Please note that we include the EDs here because the party absorbed a significant number of former BNP activists a few years ago, but in fact none of the candidates this year are ex-BNP.

After UKIP’s disastrous council election results, it’s no surprise to see the party contesting far fewer constituencies than in 2015: down from 624 to around 400 (the official total has yet to be confirmed). Some of these are sensible decisions not to stand against pro-Brexit MPs, but other cases seem to reflect the party’s rapid decline. For example there are no UKIP candidates in Cornwall, and the party is not standing in Rossendale & Darwen, held by a pro-Remain Tory, Jake Berry.

One beneficiary of UKIP’s decline will be Pendle BNP: the party’s last remaining councillor Brian Parker will have no UKIP opponent at the General Election – neither will party chairman Adam Walker in Bishop Auckland.

BNP candidates

Bexleyheath & Crayford
Peter Finch

Bishop Auckland
Adam Walker

Charnwood
Stephen Denham

Dagenham & Rainham
Paul Sturdy

Eltham
John Clarke

Hornchurch & Upminster
David Furness

Old Bexley & Sidcup
Michael Jones

Pendle
Brian Parker

South Basildon & East Thurrock
Paul Borg

Note: Additionally Richard Perry, the BNP’s Eastern regional organiser, is standing in the Maldon constituency but will not have the BNP name on the ballot paper: his party description is ‘Fighting Unsustainable Housing Because We Care’, which is among the BNP’s registered descriptions with the Electoral Commission.

Arron Banks says that UKIP has dispatched itself with “a strategic bullet to the back of the head”.

Following this week’s catastrophic election results which signalled the death of UKIP, the party’s former chief donor Arron Banks has issued a statement condemning new leader Paul Nuttall and confirming plans to launch “a new movement with radical policies and direct democracy”.

According to Banks this will “launch in the autumn after the General Election, once the electoral map has been redrawn”.

A close ally of ex-UKIP leader Nigel Farage, Banks contrasted the successes of the Farage era with the shambles that UKIP has become:

“If we use the analogy of UKIP as a racing car, Nigel was a skilled driver who drove the car around the track faster and faster, knowing when to take risks, delighting the audience.

“The current leadership has crashed the car, at the first bend of the race, into the crowd, killing the driver and spectators.

“As one of the Leave.EU team said to me: a strategic bullet to the back of the head.

The Party’s Over: Nigel Farage (left) is no doubt relieved not to be sharing the blame for terrible UKIP results in 2017.

The 2017 elections have been even worse than predicted for UKIP – wiped off the map with not a single councillor re-elected. The collapsing share of the vote across what were once UKIP’s strongest counties repeated the pattern observed over the past year in H&D‘s regular analysis of local by-elections: down from 14.3% to 7.4% in Lincolnshire; from 20.0% to 6.3% in Suffolk; from 23.5% to 6.0% in Norfolk; and from 27.0% to 7.4% in Essex.

The party’s only success was in Padiham & Burnley West, Lancashire, where UKIP’s Alan Hosker won the county council seat once held by the BNP’s Sharon Wilkinson. (Strangely UKIP had failed to contest this in 2013 when Cllr Wilkinson stood down.) Elsewhere in Lancashire there were some UKIP disappointments in target divisions such as Preston East, where they polled 11.3%. (H&D editor Mark Cotterill had polled 22.3% in Preston East on slightly different boundaries in 2009.) In the neighbouring Preston South East UKIP fared even worse with just 6.7%, justly punished for failure to do any campaigning in these White working class areas of the city which voted heavily Leave in last year’s EU referendum.

Total UKIP support in Lancashire was down from 14.7% to 3.0% (partly reflecting a reduced number of candidates); similarly UKIP’s vote in Devon fell from 23.3% to 4.4%.

In overnight results UKIP votes collapsed across two former strongholds, Essex and Lincolnshire.

The landslide win for ex-UKIP councillor Kerry Smith, re-elected as an independent, contrasted with the near-annihilation of his former party.

Ex-UKIP county councillor Kerry Smith (who was forced to quit the party in 2014 after a row over “offensive remarks”) retained his seat with a vastly increased majority, standing as an independent in the Basildon Westley Heights division of Essex. UKIP didn’t put up a candidate against him. Cllr Smith won 60.6% of the vote this time, compared to 29.0% when he first won the seat for UKIP in 2013.

But UKIP’s own official candidates were badly beaten. Every Essex UKIP seat was lost, including another Basildon division, Laindon Park & Fryerns, where they were pushed into third place.

Staying in Essex, UKIP lost the Thundersley division (part of the Castle Point constituency) to the Tories by almost 2,000 votes. (Last time UKIP won this by 200.) Another Castle Point seat was lost to the Tories, again by more than 2,000 votes, in the South Benfleet division; while in the Harlow divisions UKIP incompetence led to their candidates failing to be validly nominated.

Labour’s defeats last night and today will make bigger headlines (especially some heavy losses to the Tories in Warwickshire) but by any objective measure this has been an even worse election for Paul Nuttall than for Jeremy Corbyn.

If this disaster is repeated at the General Election next month, Nigel Farage and his financial backer Arron Banks are sure to go ahead with their plans for a new ‘Patriotic Alliance’ to replace UKIP.

By far the best nationalist results were predictably in Pendle, an area of Lancashire where UKIP failed to put up any candidates and where the BNP has its sole remaining borough councillor, Brian Parker.

Mr Parker finished third with 719 votes (20.4%) in Pendle Central; his colleague John Rowe who was the only White candidate for the Nelson East division polled 500 votes (10.8%).

Ex-serviceman Pete Molloy, a former BNP activist, achieved one of the few good nationalist votes standing as an independent.

Outside Pendle the outstanding nationalist performance was ex-BNP activist Pete Molloy’s 601 votes (14.8%) standing as an independent in Spennymoor, Durham. Admittedly this is one of the rare areas that elects independent councillors, but Mr Molloy polled more than double the UKIP vote. On a bleak night for both nationalists and UKIP this was a rare bright spot.

Among the overnight results the BNP highlight was their Eastern region organiser Richard Perry almost overtaking the fading UKIP in Heybridge & Tollesbury, an area of Essex where the BNP has campaigned almost solely on the issue of opposing “unsustainable” housing developments. Mr Perry polled 422 votes (8.2%), only 12 votes behind UKIP – but more than 2,500 votes behind the Tory winner.

In nearby Maldon, Mr Perry’s BNP colleague Trevor Cable (again fighting on the “unsustainable housing” issue and with this slogan on the ballot paper) fared less well with 115 votes (2.4%).

In the Basildon Pitsea division, BNP candidates Paul Borg and Christine Winter finished bottom of the poll with 2.1% (the same as the NF polled in 2013). Again UKIP were badly beaten here, in a division where they had been only just behind Labour in 2013.

The BNP’s Paul Hooks was again bottom of the poll in Halstead, polling 0.5% (down from 1.1% last time).

As in Essex, UKIP was wiped out in Lincolnshire (another former stronghold which includes the Boston & Skegness constituency targeted by Nuttall) losing seats in Boston and elsewhere to the Tories.

The UKIP vote across Lincolnshire was almost halved to 7.4% from 14.3% in 2013.

Amid the UKIP disaster in Kent, where they lost every single seat, the BNP polled modestly – even in Swanley, where there was no UKIP candidate, BNP candidate Cliff Le May managed only 2.5%, while Ronald Ball polled 1.6% in Dartford NE and Michael Cope 0.9% in Dartford W.

The only racial nationalist result in Wales was in Llangewydd & Brynhyfryd, Bridgend, where the NF’s Adam Lloyd polled 21 votes (3.0%).

Likewise the NF was the only racial nationalist party with a presence in Scotland. Outgoing NF chairman Dave MacDonald polled 29 votes (1.2%) in the Tillydrone, Seaton & Old Aberdeen ward of Aberdeen; his colleague Billy Watson had 10 votes (0.2%) in the Torry & Ferryhill ward.

Kevin Bryan (right) about to return as NF Chairman, was the only NF candidate in England, with his colleague Adam Lloyd (left) the only racial nationalist candidate from any party in Wales.

NF chairman Kevin Bryan will be disappointed with his 50 votes (1.6%) in Whitworth & Bacup, Lancashire, where even UKIP only polled 9.6%: the local contest there was dominated by the Tories, who gained this redrawn seat from Labour by just 17 votes. Even before this result H&D understands the NF was likely not to field General Election candidates, having quite reasonably concluded that this fake ‘snap’ election is likely to be dominated by the destruction of UKIP and a voter reaction against Corbyn’s Labour – there will be little time for smaller nationalist parties to develop a campaign.

The only British Democratic Party candidate, Kevan Stafford in Loughborough South, Leicestershire, polled 30 votes (1.1%) in Loughborough South, Leicestershire, a division which was similarly dominated by a close Tory-Labour contest and where UKIP slipped to 3.4%. The difference is that both Mr Bryan and Mr Stafford had actually done some work (unlike most UKIP candidates), so their result was scant reward for serious effort.

There were contrasting results for the two British Resistance candidates in Worcestershire. Party leader and former BNP organiser Carl Mason polled 11 votes (0.5%) in Nunnery, while his colleague Linda Bell fared better with 39 votes (2.0%) in Gorse Hill & Warndon.

English Democrat leader Robin Tilbrook was the only county council candidate for his much reduced party, polling 1.7% in Ongar & Rural – an Essex division where UKIP lost two-thirds of their 2013 vote. Elsewhere the headline result for the EDs was in the Greater Manchester mayoral election, where ED candidate Steve Morris with 2.0% finished ahead of the scandal-plagued UKIP rabbi Shneur Odze on 1.9%. Meanwhile the ED mayoral candidate for Cambridgeshire & Peterborough, Stephen Goldspink, polled 1.1%.

Polls have closed in local elections held today across many parts of the country – with the notable exception of Greater London. These elections will be seen as a dress rehearsal for next month’s general election, but are likely to be distorted by very low turnouts.

English Democrats – 4 candidates (we include the EDs in this list because in recent years the party absorbed some former BNP members and therefore included some people who would be regarded by H&D readers as part of our movement; we should however make it clear that none of the candidates below are former BNP members)